Slate

So we can easily agree that seeking a better understanding of the dynamics of the innovation ecosystem is desirable. The point I want to make is that misunderstanding those dynamics through fatuous quantification mechanisms is in fact damaging to the system itself. Talking about the “pace of technological change” is only the tip of the spear of MBA-speak that is stabbing the academy.

Gen. John Allen, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, testified before Congress this week for the first time since his confirmation, and I haven’t seen such unbridled optimism about a war—any war—since Donald Rumsfeld’s heyday.

“To be sure, the last couple months have been trying,” Allen acknowledged, referring to the Koran burnings, the massacre of 16 Afghan citizens, the killing of U.S. advisers by their Afghan underlings, and other disasters. But, he added, “I am confident that we will prevail in this endeavor.”

This week, the first film based on the blockbuster young-adult book trilogy The Hunger Games will open, crowning its stars heartthrobs and, likely, making Lionsgate, its studio, a mint.

Much discussion has focused on The Hunger Games as commentary on the popularity of reality television; actress Jennifer Lawrence, who stars as the temperamental heroine Katniss Everdeen, said as much in a recent interview. But barely mentioned in the film—if at all—is another, subtler lesson currently in vogue among young-adult fiction: the societal implications of climate change.

Can technology be autonomous? Does it lead a life of its own and operate independently of human guidance? From the French theologian Jacques Ellul to the Unabomber, this used to be widely accepted. Today, however, most historians and sociologists of technology dismiss it as naive and inaccurate.

Yet the world of modern finance is increasingly dependent on automated trading, with sophisticated computer algorithms finding and exploiting pricing irregularities that are invisible to ordinary traders.

Is there pent-up demand for a $75,000 electric SUV that can outrun a Porsche? South African entrepreneur Elon Musk is gambling that there is. Other entrepreneurs are making similar bets: More than a dozen countries and thousands of incumbent and startup entrepreneurial companies around the world have placed competing chips on the table with the conviction that advanced batteries and electrified vehicles are the next new thing. All together, they will park some two dozen models in Asian, European, and U.S. showrooms in 2012 and 2013.

The game is over in Afghanistan. An American presence can no longer serve any purpose. Or, rather, it can only extend and exacerbate the pathologies of this war. It is time to get out, and more quickly than President Obama had been planning. The consequences of leaving may be grim, but the consequences of staying are probably grimmer.

Still, with his new book, The Escape Artists: How Obama's Team Fumbled the Recovery, Noam Scheiber offers a persuasive take on administration policymaking, one in which there are no heroes and no villains, no fools, no saints, not even a clear road not ...

Once again, we find ourselves way in over our heads in Afghanistan, and at the worst possible time: when President Obama, who seems to have recognized this fact, is trying to get out while preserving a modicum of stability—something the Taliban, other insurgents, and possibly well-armed criminal gangs seem determined to block.